Tim Parrish, Texas Christian University
Abstract
In Jesus' Son, perhaps Johnson's most representative work,
Johnson portrays the story of his narrator's search for religious
transcendence through a creative engagement with Lou Reed's
great song about drug addiction and spiritual yearning, "Heroin." The
title of the book is in fact a coded reference to Reed's "Heroin" (mentioned
in the epigraph) and to the narrator's search to become worthy of
Jesus Christ's legacy. Lou Reed, though, is the novel's authorizing
voice, or spirit of the novel. Johnson writes a kind of confessional
novel--the story of his birth of an artist that also refers to his
status as a born-again Christian. In using Reed's "Heroin" to
structure his fictional autobiography, Johnson acknowledges
that Lou Reed helped give him the vision to render a horrid
world true and beautiful, something worth saving.
[1] Despite the fact that three of Denis Johnson's books are included
by Harold Bloom in his The Western Canon, Johnson has not
received the critical attention he deserves. Part
of this neglect may be because Johnson's work is difficult to categorize:
his characters are usually drug addicts with little interest in
achieving the usual forms of American "success" regardless
of their lives' social or political position. Nor are they that
concerned about protesting against an unjust society that denies
them access to its rewards. On the surface, they are only looking
to make their next connection–be it with a drug or an occasional
friend or lover. Eschewing a political context for his work,
Johnson favours characters and implicitly readers who believe in
the power of narrative to transform personal lives. The narrative
complicity he seeks is distinctly religious in orientation. For
Johnson, an acknowledged born-again Christian, narrative matters
only insofar as it is spiritually regenerative: his characters seek
stories that will allow them to transcend their lives as they have
known them.
[2] In Jesus' Son, perhaps Johnson's most representative
work, Johnson portrays the story of his narrator's search for religious
transcendence through a creative engagement with Lou Reed's great
song about drug addiction and spiritual yearning, "Heroin." The
title of the book is in fact a coded reference to Reed's "Heroin" (mentioned
in the epigraph) and to the narrator's search to become worthy of
Jesus Christ's legacy. Lou Reed, though, is the novel's authorizing
voice, or spirit of the novel. He is the muse that the narrator,
who is named for us only as "Fuckhead" (hereafter F.H.),
invokes to tell his story and we cannot approach the book except
through Reed's voice. The verse Johnson cites from Reed is: "When
I'm rushing on my run/And I feel just like Jesus' son." Reed's
song is about a heroin addict explaining to a potentially unsympathetic
audience why he does something over and over that seems to invite
only self-destruction. The central paradox "Heroin" explores
is that the same force that is killing the singer is what makes
life seem bearable, even worth living for. The second verse begins: "I
have made a big decision/I'm gonna try to nullify my life",
and clearly this song is an account not only of that desire but
the release pursuing this desire gives him. Reed's singer says that
injecting heroin into his bloodstream makes him "feel just
like Jesus' son" to convey the power, the feeling of pleasant
self-aggrandizement, that overwhelms him when he is high. Although
Reed's narrator wants to shock his audience since he implies that
his acts are somehow indebted to Jesus, he is less interested in
arguing about Jesus than he is sharing as directly as possible his
own overwhelming sense of self-absorption. After comparing
himself to Jesus' son, he sings twice "I guess but I just don't
know" and these are also the words employed to complete the
song. That is, the only world that is real to him is the one that
he discovers while he is high; he will speak for no others. When
he does receive glimmers of a world beyond his own interior one,
he is aware of "politicians making crazy sounds" and "dead
bodies piled up in mounds." The song implies both that
the city (New York) the singer inhabits is a moral and physical
wasteland and that the singer takes heroin in order to escape that
wasteland. To a certain extent, his drug-taking makes him into a
projection of the urban landscape and society he dreads, but one
that he transcends though his heroin-induced mystical visions.
[3] I am discussing the lyrics as if they were poetry but the words
are enlivened by music and Reed's extraordinary vocal performance.
Much of song is a loud, barbarous squawk. The rush of the drug is
conveyed by a blooming atonal buzz, a howling that often compels
uninitiated listeners either to leave the room or to shut down the
sound system. The noise of the music means to set up a barrier that
only the truly infected (symbolically or otherwise) would care to
cross. Despite the music's pitch of driving atonality, the overall
feeling the song conveys is one of beautiful surrender. In this
respect "Heroin" accomplishes the same goal Jesus'
Son seeks: to give voice to a visionary way of perceiving the
world that normally dies with its expression. Johnson, like Reed,
speaks for the nameless, those imprisoned souls who can neither
escape their lives nor make them into the poetry they long not just
to hear, read, or know but to become. Hence, Reed and Johnson are
arguably both religious writers because they are both obsessed with
communicating through art an experience beyond the sensation of
ordinary life.
[4] Johnson situates Jesus's Son within the context of "Heroin" both
to pay tribute to Reed and to subvert Reed's work into something
else. Although Reed's singer and Johnson's narrator each articulate
a sense of illegitimacy as unacknowledged sons of Jesus, only Johnson's
character seems touched with the possibility of being able to redeem
his life. Still, virtually everything that occurs in the book is
implied by the song, from the acts of crime the narrator commits
to maintain his habit to the casually wasted persona of the narrator-protagonist.
In the mind of Johnson's narrator and throughout his story generally,
Reed's line " I guess but I just know" becomes a kind
of benediction, a blessing that hides the narrator's fear of the
world and his involvement in it. In one story F.H. finds himself
carrying a baby who has just survived a car wreck that killed the
baby's father. The narrator is anxious because he worries he might
somehow be responsible for the child's welfare. When a bystander
conveys to him the impression that no one is responsible, the narrator's
gratitude is practically unbounded. In pointed contrast to "Heroin," Jesus'
Son portrays the successful realization of a lasting redemption
from the sordidness of one's life. Indeed, Johnson's narrator claims
the mantle of Jesus's son not as a bit of wry drug humor, but to
convey his sincere hope to live a life worthy of anyone's–even
Jesus'–scrutiny. In "Dundun" he speaks of a moment "when
the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before
the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a
long time" (51). The narrative never portrays this moment:
it appears only as a retroactive prophecy open to the reader's interpretation.
With "Heroin" the song implies the singer's death; with Jesus'
Son the narrative implies F.H.'s rebirth. "Heroin" inspires
Johnson to write a conversion narrative in which the conversion
is not depicted. In the process, Johnson acknowledges that the decidedly
unchristian Lou Reed inspired him to become an artist capable of
both controlling and portraying not only his self's transformation
but the longing for beauty that supersedes all of his other quests
and ultimately brings him to Christ.
[5] The protagonist's world that Johnson evokes through Reed is
a version of hell–a hell that is defined by and conveyed through
the vision of Lou Reed's "Heroin." Surrounding the narrator
are tortured souls trapped in existences that they cannot escape,
perhaps because they have found the life that best suits them. In "Out
on Bail" the narrator tells of an aging boxer who "spoke
in two voices" and had "wasted his entire life." This
man "was dear to those of us who'd only wasted a few years" (37).
Except for the narrator, the characters lead endless, wasted lives
that none obviously can escape. The narrator knows that he and the
other characters look for places where they can meet others, like
the boxer, in order to commune with versions of themselves.
[6] It is no exaggeration to observe that the structure of Jesus's
Son is a classic conversion narrative that follows Dante's
progress in the Divine Comedy. In Johnson's work, just
as in Dante's Inferno or Reed's "Heroin," condemned
souls are reduced to the essence of their being: they become
their life's defining sin. F.H., like Dante, is the pilgrim who
experiences "hell"–but only so he can transcend
it as Jesus' metaphorical son. If the book were not told from
a point in time after the events being depicted, the reader could
not imagine that the protagonist could ever escape his world. "Happy
Hour," for instance, exemplifies the ongoing hell in which
F.H. and the other characters have been placed. Describing the
lost souls who haunt the bars of First Avenue in Seattle, the
narrator speaks of how
People
entering the bars on First Avenue gave up their bodies. Then
only the demons inhabiting us could be seen. Souls who had wronged
each other were brought together here. The rapist met his victim,
the jilted child discovered its mother. But nothing could be
healed, the mirror was a knife dividing everything from itself,
tears of false fellowship dripped on the bar (122).
This passage depicts the pain of the transformation that does not
occur, the endless re-enactment of the same profane existence figured
as an endlessly recurring violation. They are like the doomed in
Dante, or Reed's narrator, in that they have fallen to the circle
of existence that most perfectly expresses their spiritual state. Clearly,
the lost souls that haunt this bar are imprisoned within their bodies
as a consequence of their inability to find appropriate expression
for their spiritual longing. Their physical decay expresses their
metaphysical condition. Here "the dead come back" because
they continue to fail to figure a way out of the hell they have
made for themselves. "Some of the most terrible things that
had happened to me in my life had happened there," the narrator
says of one place they frequent, "but like the others I kept
coming back" (37). The bar where these damned souls must consume
daily the bitter fruit of their lives is also the space where they
gather to relive the terrible moment of self-recognition that they
can never escape. Thus the confrontation between mother/jilted child
or rapist/victim evokes the terror experienced by the wrongdoer–the
betrayer–forever facing, but never transcending, the consequences
of a past violation she or he committed. Sharing their misery–their “tears
of false fellowship”–through a kind of communion taken
with their shots of drink and smack, the characters Johnson writes
about abuse their bodies in effort to communicate with their souls.
Their perpetual self-violations come to seem part of an endless
cycle that will end only symbolically with their physical death
since their imprisoned souls cannot be released.
[7] Reed and Johnson both practice their art as a means for confronting
people living on the edge of their humanity. Searching for worlds
better than the ones they know, their characters do things that
most Americans would find both morally objectionable and deeply
psychotic. The disparity between the world as they want it be and
the world as they experience it causes them to accept acts of violation
and betrayal as the given of their existence. They become characters
that only someone such as Jesus might save. Yet, Johnson's work
suggests that all actions have moral consequences and the story
is told in such a way that the narrator is implicated in the crime–even
if he was not there. In "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" the
narrator knows that innocents are about to be massacred but does
nothing to stop it. In "Dirty Wedding" the narrator wants
to protest his girlfriend's abortion but cannot. Instead, he imagines
himself as the fetus being destroyed, an extreme reflection on his
own ongoing death-in-life. In this harrowing story, the narrator
confronts a version of himself who did not make it, the child he
and his girlfriend chose to abort. Here he addresses not only his
audience but himself:
Think
of being curled up and floating in darkness. Even if you could think,
even if you had an imagination, would you ever imagine its opposite,
this miraculous world the Asian Taoists call the "Ten Thousand
Things"? And if the darkness just got darker? And then
you were dead? What would you care? How would you even know
the difference? (98)
The rhetorical questions convey the narrator's sense of his own
identity. He is haunted by the lost child whom he understands to
carry the terrifying message that no life can ever end. "I
felt the cancelled life dreaming after me" (95). This cancelled
life pursues him in the book where he walks a "circular hallway" that
he understands to be "the place where, between our lives on
this earth, we go back to mingle with other souls who have been
born" (151). To Reed's singer there is no life but this one
which is what makes his hero's bid for transcendence seem such a
desperate gamble. He risks his life for the confirmation of his
vision. Johnson's narrator distinguishes himself from the other
characters in the book because he suspects that no life, however
empty, is ever fully lost and that all souls will have the opportunity
to redeem themselves. As F.H. remarks in "Out on Bail" when
an acquaintance dies after shooting up from the same batch of heroin
also used by F.H., "He died. I am still alive" (42).
[8] The intimation and perhaps knowledge of potential rebirth is
what gives Johnson's narrator the power to take on the voice of
a prophet–to be the son of Jesus that Reed's persona
claims himself to be. "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" establishes
the narrator's persona as both a visionary and as one who has the
chance to be reborn into a different kind of life. The story concerns
a car crash the narrator suffers. At least two people are killed
and others are badly broken (the narrator is already broken). By
telling the story retrospectively, with startling shifts in time,
Johnson structures the narrator's perception of the event as if
he knew it was going to occur and was helpless to stop it. This
ability to look back without being able to avert the tragedy is
what gives the story its power. It suggests the narrator's relationship
to his own past life at the same time it makes him a prophet.
My
jaw ached. I knew every raindrop by its name. I sensed everything
before it happened. I knew a certain Oldsmobile would stop
for me even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the
family inside it I knew we'd have an accident in the storm. (4)
The family's voices are siren-like, leading them unknowingly to
their own destruction. The narrator's familiarity with every raindrop
conveys his drug-induced state: a sense of clarity that is irrelevant
to the world that is being experienced by the others. The phrase "stop
for me" suggests that the experience belongs to the narrator,
not the doomed family. He is the chosen one fated to carry this
event away as a story that others must hear and understand.
[9] When the Oldsmobile crashes, as the narrator retrospectively
knows it will, the man driving the car and his wife wake him up, "denying
it viciously" (6). They yell "Oh-no" and "NO!" but
the narrator renders their protests almost childishly futile. Johnson's
depiction of the crash is cinematic so that the feeling of dislocation
is rendered with naturalistic precision: "A liquid which I
knew right away was human blood flew around the car and rained on
my head" (6). These raindrops he does not know by name, but
being touched by the blood suggests that his survival is also a
kind of resurrection. "I rose up," he remarks, to find
himself "the president of this tragedy" (7, 10). Walking
among the dead and the dying the narrator carries with him the baby
with whom he has been riding, unseatbelted, in the back seat. Like
the narrator, the reader hardly knows how to take this baby. It
is possible that the baby is meant as a double for the narrator's
consciousness–the suggestion that his survival marks his beginning
into a new life free of the cycle of drug abuse and spiritual despair
that has brought him to this moment. F.H. as depicted, however,
sees the baby only as something he wishes to deliver himself of
as quickly as possible. He tries to give the baby to a truck driver
who has pulled up to ask what happened. The driver refuses, though,
saying "you'd better hang onto him" (9). The moment
is, for the narrator, more terrifying than the crash itself because
it confirms his fear that he might somehow be responsible for the
baby after all. A moment before the narrator had taken hope from
the driver's casualness in the face of tragedy because "by
his manner he seemed to endorse the idea of not doing anything about
this" (9). By refusing to relieve the narrator of what fate
had dropped into the narrator's life, the truck driver suggests
to him that the baby will live and so must the narrator. He writes
the book–tells his life story–so that he may be responsible
for this knowledge.
[10] The narrator admits that "I'd thought something was required
of me, but I hadn't wanted to find out what it was" (9). What
that something turns out to be is the narrator's eventual recognition
that he is required to confront a tragedy that belongs not only
to him but is in a sense universal–the cost of living. What
will be required of him is seeing through the world's pain to the
possibility of redemption embedded in the pain he witnesses and
suffers. Consider this remarkable passage, which describes the grief
of the woman when she learns her husband is dead. Here Johnson positions
the reader to reflect on what the narrator cannot yet understand.
Down
the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't
know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave
her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with
a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed slab
of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds
were being incinerated there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked
as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be
alive to hear it. I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere.
(11)
This woman's scream, and the narrator's apprehension of it, is Johnson's
version of Reed's "Heroin." Just as the listener of "Heroin" comes
to appreciate the beauty that the music's atonal howl unleashes,
so must the narrator, and ultimately the reader, understand that
this woman's howl serves as a kind of initiation into a more profound
understanding of one's place in the world. When Reed's son of Jesus
dreams of being "born a thousand years ago" and sailing "the
darkened seas" on "a great big clipper ship," he
seeks a moment of stillness and serenity in the midst of a terrifying
maelstrom. Likewise, for Johnson's son of Jesus the woman's scream
stills the chaos of the accident: its terror and beauty are compressed
into this one single moment, the duration of which makes bearable
the confusion that is his life. The wonder the narrator experiences
upon hearing the woman's scream is a version of what he feels when
he shoots heroin. The moment is a revelation to him because he hears
in the expression of her unmediated pain a version of what he understands
his life to be. Whenever he shoots up, he realizes, he has been
looking not only to experience life in the purity that the woman
apprehends it, but for a way to control that feeling. Shooting heroin
provides the narrator with a sense of his life's inherent drama
without the ability to control or even understand that drama. As
a confessional narrative, however, Jesus' Son, like Reed's "Heroin," would
give the woman's scream to the reader as a kind of recognition of
what we all must go through to experience life's enduring worth.
[11] The narrator's stunning account of the woman's agony is interrupted
by an assertion of denial: "There's nothing wrong with me" (11).
That is, he initially denies his complicity with what he has witnessed
and in the story's concluding paragraphs he presents this denial,
not the awareness the scream inspires, as the defining fact of his
life. Yet, that scream defines the book to the extent that it expresses
a humanity that we all share. If the act of narrating Jesus' Son
is itself an attempt to take responsibility for his life, then the
life he depicts is a daily attempt to avoid the responsibility inherent
in his recognition of the woman's pain, which is a version of his
own. One might argue that the "Heroin" singer imagines
himself to be Jesus' son because he knows there is no Jesus who
is going to save him from the world of corruption he perceives and
therefore he must save himself. His big decision can only take him
away from society; the only screams he hears will be his own. Johnson's
hero, however, seeks communion in his isolation. Unlike Reed's singer, he
will ultimately preserve his unique vision not as an act of utter
self-consumption but as a vision that others may recognize and share.
In this respect, the clairvoyance, the intimation of the divine
that F.H. gleans throughout the work is not merely a side-effect
of the drugs; it is a gift and it is real. He can say with his friend
Georgie who, when asked in "Emergency” to name his occupation,
declares, "I save lives" (88).
[12] What can make Johnson painful to read, or Reed painful to listen
to, is that for their characters no single act, murder or forgiveness,
is morally superior to any other one. The "stupendous process" by
which "diamonds were being incinerated in there" describes
how the terror of life is converted into the lasting beauty of art.
This description better fits Reed's "Heroin" than Johnson's
Jesus’ Son since Reed's perspective is so insistently anti-Christian.
Different degrees of perception of one's acts are possible and one's
perception of any given event does determine the meaning that event
takes, but this understanding does not change the fact that every
single moment these characters experience beauty and terror as a
single emotion. In "Dundun," the title character shoots
another character and kills him. The shooting, but not the death,
has already happened by the time the narrator shows up on the scene.
The dialogue that ensues is comically deadpan:
"McInnes
isn't feeling too good today. I just shot him."
"You
mean killed him?"
"I
didn't mean to."
"Is
he really dead?"
"No.
He's sitting down."
The narrator makes no effort to explain what has occurred because
assigning motivation and guilt does not interest him. He is merely
there to pick up some pharmaceutical opium. Once he discovers that
the opium is all used up he decides to salvage his errand by driving
McInnes to the hospital. He hopes that by being known as the one
who saved McInnes, he "would be liked" (48). When his
charge in fact dies on the way to the hospital, the narrator is
undisturbed. He decides that he is glad McInnes is dead because
McInnes was the one who gave him his unfortunate but deserved name.
No one in the story is interested in determining what caused the
death or how the blame for it should be distributed because death
is understood to be incidental to the pursuit of what Lou Reed might
call "kicks." Moreover, giving and receiving "kicks" makes
anybody else's death irrelevant because such a death seems so inevitable.
[13] At one point Johnson's narrator observes, "I was in this
life because I could tolerate no other." What he means
is that as bad as this life seems, it is the only one he can know.
There is an implication that other lives might exist and he might
one day know them, but for now accepting this life means accepting
everything that is a part of it. This includes the vision he sees
in a snowstorm of angels descending to earth (actually he sees the
projection of actors on a drive-in movie screen); it also includes
the moment he punched his girlfriend in the stomach just because
he could not think of anything appropriate to say to her. The question
for Johnson, as for Reed, becomes: what relation does the reader
(or listener) have to the kicks being portrayed? Johnson specifically
raises this point by including the reader in the action being described.
He employs the rarely used device of shifting unexpectedly into
the second person address. At the end of "Dundun," for
instance, the narrator casually observes that "if I opened
your head and ran a hot soldering iron around in your brain, I might
turn you into something like [Dundun]" (51). In "Beverly
Home" the narrator addresses the audience while relating his
experience as a peeping tom.
How
could I do it, how could a person go that low? And I understand
your question, to which I reply, Are you kidding? That's nothing.
I'd been much lower than that. And I expected myself to do
worse. (147)
Where Reed's "Heroin" does not reflect on its status as
art, Johnson's narrator comments on his narrative, and the acts
contained within it, not only to earn the audience's confidence,
but to confront us as directly as possible.Consequently,
his forthrightness may be limited by his reluctance to compromise
his audience's view of him by telling us how much lower he may have
indeed sunk. His ultimate strategy, though, is not to conceal the
extent of his crimes from the audience so that our trust will be
easier to earn but to make the likely unwilling reader into a co-actor
in his life.
[14] "Emergency," for instance, is Johnson's meditation
on his subject matter and the relationship to it he shares with
a possibly unwilling audience. In this story the narrator is working
as an orderly disoriented by pills he has stolen and ingested, when
a man walks into the hospital with a knife stuck in his eye. The
man can still see out of his damaged eye. Since his other eye is
glass, his vision is literally framed by the knife. The doctor on
call is reluctant to treat it and calls immediately for as many
specialists as occur to him. Before science can intervene, though,
the narrator's friend, Georgie, an orderly completely stoned on
pills he has been stealing, pulls the knife out of the man's eye.
The patient is healed; "it's just one of those things" a
nurse says to a stunned doctor (76). What connects this story to "Beverly
Home" is that the injured man, Terence Weber, reveals that
his wife stabbed him for "peeping on the lady next door while
she was out there sunbathing" (86). The reader sees that Weber
is a version of the narrator, another peeping Tom. If Weber does
not understand his pain and the pain he has caused as being connected,
then Johnson uses the reader's complicity with Weber to prompt us
to this conclusion. Ironically, while the knife stuck in the eye
is intentional, the healing is accidental, a moment of dumb luck
or grace depending on how you want to see it. For F.H., the
knife in the eye brings a kind of renewed vision: an act that divides
everything from itself only as a prelude to combining this division
into something whole. In this context, violence and pain are the
necessary precursors to moral regeneration.
[15] In "Beverly Home," Johnson further explores how the
narrator's voyeurism is a mirror held up to the audience: here is
where we the readers receive Weber's knife in our eyes. Standing
outside the woman's house, afraid that he will be seen, the narrator
is momentarily disturbed when the woman upon whom he spies moves
to the window and stares directly at him–only she cannot see
that he is there. "My face wasn't two feet from hers, but it
was dark out and she could only have been looking at her own reflection,
not at me" (155). He had been hoping to catch her and
her husband making love and instead he witnesses a disagreement
that is ended by the husband when he kneels to wash her feet. The
gesture, as surprising as it is tender, seems to be an inversion
of Mary washing Jesus' feet, or is perhaps an allusion to the Last
Supper. Significantly, the husband's act of contrition occurs immediately
after the woman stares at the narrator without seeing him. The narrator
presumes the couple to be Mennonites and it may be that she is silently
praying. Standing, as he says, "on the dark side of her," he
understands himself to be part of the reflection she sees (155).
If so, then the moment of tenderness she receives is connected to
his presence. Perhaps her prayer summons her Jesus to make himself
known through F.H.'s presence; perhaps her prayer has nothing to
do with him at all and he is just a lonely pervert standing forever
on the outside of love. Instead of witnessing a couple having
sex, he sees them reading the Bible together. The relief the reader
may experience for not having to witness the couple's physical intimacy
becomes something more difficult to define when we realize Johnson
has made us witnesses to an unexpected, even miraculous, spiritual
union.
[16] Secular readers may be the most uncomfortable because what
Johnson seems to suggest is that behind every lurid desire lies
a grace waiting to overwhelm you into seeing the world differently–perhaps
even from the very point of view you most want to deny. Nonetheless,
Johnson seems to want to write a kind of scripture; one can even
read the work as if it were a modern version of one of the lost
books of the Bible. You could think of it as an addition to the
so-called Gnostic Gospels–inspired by the twenty-one missing
years of Jesus' life. To a believing Christian, such a reading could
only be blasphemy, unless you share the narrator's point of view
and understand him to have been truly touched by Christ. To Johnson,
however, the narrative is about conversion and the unlikely redemption
of his protagonist. Regardless of your religious orientation (or
lack thereof), Johnson will try to convert each of his readers to
an unembarrassed sense of spiritual renewal.
[17] The book's concluding sentence suggests that by the time he
writes his story the narrator has become with one with the maimed
and the deformed who look to be healed: "I had never known,
never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place
for people like us" (160). By now he is working at a kind of
hospice called Beverly Home and is charged with healing others simply
by touching them. Like Lou Reed's "Heroin" singer, he
presents himself as someone who has lived out our darkest fantasies
so that we do not have to. Reed's singer pursues his self's
end because he knows he alone is responsible for his own salvation
(or damnation). Johnson's stance ultimately is not that of one who
has remained true to his vices but one who has escaped them. As
a self-portrait of himself before he became an artist, Jesus' Son
will tell us where Johnson's art comes from and even hint that his
end was in the beginning; like Reed, he will not separate his survival
from what he has survived. Johnson's refusal to connect all the
dots, to give us a scene that says "and then I decided that
I would quit using drugs and become a real writer" is more
than a refusal of banality, or the commonplaces of linear narrative.
His silence about his birth as an artist is, I think, a reproduction
of the silence that follows the woman's scream in the first story.
It acknowledges that his survival is mysterious, an unexpected blessing
for which he must be grateful.
[18] When Reed sings in "Heroin" "I don't know where
I'm going but I'm going to try for the kingdom if I can," he
defines the existential dream of Johnson's protagonist–his
desire to live despite his death-in-life. For Reed, there is in
this assertion a quiet defiance, a refusal to believe the world
is as sordid as it appears, even if the clipper ship he dreams of
sailing is likely carrying him to his death. I think Johnson understands
Reed's singer to be enacting a version of death from which he will
be reborn but only into a endless repetition of the same cycle–a
version of what his characters experience at the bars they frequent.
Reed's singer may be headed toward his death but that is not exactly
what he wants. In this respect, Reed's "Heroin" singer,
better than the Biblical Jesus who lives for others rather than
himself, communicates the craving for salvation that leads F.H.
to seek that moment when "the false visions had been erased" because "the
Savior did come" (51). If the reader will forgive the comparison,
Reed finds literary expression by serving unknowingly as a kind
of Virgil to Johnson's Fuckhead Dante. By
using Reed's lines from "Heroin" to frame his fictional
autobiography, Johnson acknowledges that Lou Reed helped give him
the vision to render a horrid world true and beautiful, something
worth saving and giving to others.
Notes
1. Bloom does not discuss Johnson.
He lists him in his index of authors. For critical discussions of
Johnson, see Lenz (2001), Parrish (1991), Reitenbach (1991), and
Smith (2001).
2. To speak more plainly, Jesus'
Son can be read as a religious text intent on converting
the reader to Jesus. Johnson's recent collection of essays, Seek (2001),
which should be read as a companion volume to Jesus' Son,
makes this connection blatantly obvious. Off-handedly, and incidentally,
the essays refer to Johnson's past life as a drug addict and
his current one as a born-again Christian. In "Bikers for
Jesus," Johnson characterizes himself as one who has "grown
from a criminal hedonist into a citizen of life with a belief
in eternity" (33-4). For a secular reader (such as myself),
the collection of autobiographical essays, Seek, in which
the “real” Denis Johnson appears, seems much less
interested in converting the reader to a possibly religious awakening
than the work of fiction, Jesus' Son.
3. An exception to this practice
would be Reed's disturbing song, "The Gun." Far from the
dreamy world of "Heroin," Reed in this song inhabits the
persona of one who murders for sadistic pleasure. The first five
lines establish a distance between singer and subject that is momentarily
abolished when Reed says "let's see what he can do." "The
Gun" challenges the listener to be part of the event but turns
the tables on the would-be watcher/listener by making him the victim
of the criminal's killing spree. The singer moves from warning the
listener that "he'll [the killer] blow your brains out" to
adopting the perspective of the killer himself: "Don't you
mess with me/I'm carrying a gun." The shift of narrative perspective
is startling because it retains the use of the second person. The
person addressed by the song does not change; the speaker does.
Reed thus manages to trap the listener in the listener's own violent
fantasy. Taken literally, the listener cannot hear Reed when the
narrative shifts back to the original speaker in the song's last
two lines because the listener, identified as the "animal [who]
dies with fear in his eyes," is already dead. The lines "Stay
away from him/He's got a gun" convey a mocking echo, its message
rendered futile.
4. Lou Reed has spoken of his
debt to his college mentor, Delmore Schwarz: "[he] was my teacher,
my friend, and the man who changed my life. He was the funniest,
saddest person I had ever met. I studied with him at the bar. Actually,
it was him talking and me listening. . . . At this time Delmore
would be reading Finnegan's Wake out loud, which seemed like
the only way I could get through it. Delmore thought you could do
worse with your life than devote it to reading James Joyce" (Bockris,
1994, 60-1). Inspired by Schwarz, Reed hoped to transform rock and
roll into an adult art form capable of being compared not unreasonably
with Joyce's Ulysses. "I've always thought of myself
as a writer," he told Bill Flanagan. "I work in a rock & roll
format because I really like playing my guitar and wouldn't it be
great if I could combine these three things I really like" ("Interview",
1987, 331). He adds, "My interest–all the way back from
the Velvets–has been in one really simple guiding light ideal:
take rock and roll, the pop format, and make it for adults" ("Interview",
1887, 329).
Works
Cited
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company,
1994.
Bockris, Victor. Transformer: The Lou Reed Story. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1994.
Johnson, Denis. Angels. New York: Alfred K. Knopf,
1983.
_____. Fiskadoro. New York: Alfred K. Knopf, 1985.
_____. Jesus' Son. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1992.
_____. Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond.
New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
Lenz, Millicent. "Reinventing as World: Myth in Denis Johnson's
Fiskadoro." In Nancy Anisfield, ed., The Nightmare Considered:
Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature. Bowling Green, Ohio:
Popular Press, 1991.
Parrish, Timothy L. "Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son: To Kingdom
Come." Critique 43.1 (Fall 2001): 17-29.
Reed, Lou. "Interview with Bill Flanagan." Bill Flanagan,
Ed. Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock's Greatest Songwriters,
327-38. New York: Contemporary Books, Inc. 1987.
_____. "The Gun." The Blue Mask. BMG BG2-54221.
1982.
_____. Pass Through Fire: The Collected Lyrics. New York:
Hyperion, 2000.
Reitenbach, Gail. "Foreign Exchange in Denis Johnson's The
Stars at Noon." Arizona Quarterly 47.4 (Winter
1991): 27-47.
Smith, Robert McClure. "Addiction and Recovery in Denis Johnson's
Jesus' Son." Critique 42.2 (Winter 2001): 180-91.
Velvet Underground. "Heroin." Lyrics by Lou Reed. The
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